There are plenty of examples of how AI-generated content is raising eyebrows right now. You’ve already read about the Los Angeles Times’ initiative on this. You have probably also come across references to Il Foglio, the Italian publication that created an entirely AI-generated newspaper, complete with opinions and letters to the editor, mainly to be provocative.

Separately, visual data journalism brand The Pudding used Anthropic’s Claude to interrogate data and create a story and concluded: “When we look at what Claude produced, we don’t think it looks anything like a real story we’d make at The Pudding.

“It’s sort of like comparing a woodworking artisan’s table to one from IKEA. The artisans invest immense time and effort into their high-quality pieces, while IKEA produces things quickly and cheaply, and most people probably can’t tell the difference (or don’t care)... . But that doesn’t mean there’s no place for craftsmanship.”

But there are also immensely successful examples of AI-generated content that are actually paying off — mainly because they are transparently the IKEA table rather than pretending to be works of fine craftsmanship and because they are presented to readers who really just need an IKEA table at that moment in time.

For example, AI-generated bullet-pointed summaries seem to be fulfilling a legitimate need for many news brands without undermining their credibility.

The Financial Times created summaries after they realised readers were pasting FT content to ChatGPT and asking for summarisation.

“The most exciting outcome is that no one has needed to change anything factual, and it’s been live for several months now. Only some small stylistic changes have been made to the actual output,” said Liz Lohn, director of product, AI, and editorial tech.

She said audience engagement had not declined. “Not even on the article depth. We have even seen a little bit of a positive impact on overall engagement.”

Sweden’s NTM is seeing strong results with its AI summaries. It has created a tool that grabs the five most-read stories of the moment and summarises them. An editor quickly checks them for accuracy, and then NTM uses GenAI to convert them into audio for broadcast.

This audio product appears to be helping with retention — 40% of logged-in subscribers have used the service at least once — but also with reaching those closer to the top of the funnel better, since half of the total listeners are non-subscribers.

Singapore’s CNA is creating summaries, called FAST, to serve both the time-pressed news consumer and the news avoider. It mimics the TikTok, Instagram and YouTube Shorts swiping experience.

“FAST accounts for 32% of our monthly average pageview growth from the last financial year,” CNA said in a statement. The average pageviews per visit for FAST articles is nearly five times that of regular articles, while the average pageview per unique visitor per month for FAST articles is three times that of regular articles.

Are AI-generated summaries infallible? It looks like Bloomberg is still ironing out the kinks in its summaries, which consist of three bullet points condensing the main points of the article. It has corrected at least three dozen summaries of articles published this year.

Still, “99% of AI summaries meet our editorial standards,” Bloomberg said in a statement. And, in fairness, if we want to put that number into perspective, we would need to compare it to their correction rate on content created by humans.

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